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Once upon a time there was a girl who lived in a dark world. Her name was Flora, and in Flora’s world it was always dark, and in that dark world she sat with her mother, her grandmothers, all her aunts, and all her cousins. Candles lit their cave and cast strange shadows upon the walls, and by that meager, dancing light they spun wool into yarn and wove cloth on great looms. They wove such lovely cloth, but the colors were always the same, for there were only two kinds of wool: white wool and black wool. Every morning a new basket of wool fleece appeared just inside their door. The cloth they wove from the white wool went back in the basket where the fleece came from, and the black wool they wove into cloth for themselves.

The words we use matter. They have deep connotations that affect us in profound ways.

Ellen Langer is a Harvard psychologist and author who has studied for years how the specific words we use to define ourselves and our actions also define our physiology. In one of her studies, chambermaids were told that the “work” they were doing was actually also “exercise.” After this reframing, they lost weight.

This pastel began with my love affair with Spring, when the forest is flushed with gold and taupe and green, and the milky white dogwoods flutter in the breeze.The forest is still open. You peer into the cathedral and see life.

But as I worked, carving detail into the forest, I saw that I had set a stage. The dogwoods framed the forest, and became the curtains pulling back to reveal not just the blossoming forest but also a sacrifice.

I didn’t want to feel so jaded. But there I was, sitting in my beloved studio, scrolling through Facebook. I knew I should be working. And that I should be loving the work. But mostly I was feeling stuck. And like a drug, Facebook provided temporary relief from that feeling. What I needed wasfoxfire.

After years of focusing on my productivity in the studio—trying all manner of time management and goal setting techniques—I decided to value flow above everything.

The shift wasn’t an a-ha moment. It was born out of utter frustration with myself. I was making myself miserable doing what I love. I would set a goal with a piece and time myself. When I got restless or struggled, instead of listening to my body, I would force myself to continue. I was spending less time in Nature, more time on the computer. And I could see a wall looming in front of me, one that I was going to run into if I didn’t slow down. It was a wall between me and my natural state of happiness.

“What is the emotional need that your product fulfills? Markets are conversations—how are you participating in the conversation? What are you Key Performance Indicators? How will you track them?”

And I tried. I made notes and thought deeply about the questions—legitimate business questions—that were being asked of me. I thought about how to refine my focus and how to present myself on social media in a cohesive way.

Are you tired of the status quo?There is an old Haida tale that tells how Raven brought light to the world.Basically Raven was tired of bumping into things in the dark, and so he devised a method of going into another world and stealing the sun. It involved some pretty fantastic shapeshifting and a lot of patience, but in the end he was successful in bringing light to the dark world where he—and the humans— lived.

The Trout Lily (Erythronium americanum) is a diminutive spring ephemeral in the Lily family. Trout Lilies have a very poor sexual reproduction rate —only about 10% of flowers produce seed—and so they spread mostly by corms, developing a dropper, or fleshy stem, that stretches deep into the soil away from the parent before growing its own corm at the end of the stem. Once this happens, the dropper connecting the parent and daughter plant dies off. Colonies of trout lilies have plants of varying ages, and in undisturbed forests some colonies are reputed to be over 300 years old!